With one hand she managed to hold him, and now and then the cane came down on him. In horror lest he should overcome her, and yet at the heart quite calm, she brought down the cane again and again, whilst he struggled making inarticulate noises, and lunging vicious kicks at her. In one of the most vivid scenes there is, the novel’s heroine Ursula, stuck in a bad teaching job in a working-class school near a colliery, finally overcomes her totally ineffective proto-progressive-education ideals about relating personally to the students and takes command of her out-of-control classroom by savagely beating the class clown:Īnd she loathed him, the hideous writhing thing that was nearly too much for her. For all the experience, there aren’t enough images, not enough real scenes. Critics like to quote more than one letter in which Lawrence described the novel as written in a foreign language or as something he found himself translating, which is why much of it is, at least to me, so blurred. The book just keeps coming at you in a torrent of language, all sorts of language, though not in the montage Ulysses style, just an aggressive fusion of the naturalistic, the Biblical, and the psychological. It’s also what Lawrence’s 1915 novel The Rainbow is: an ongoing experience, in service to a new vision of life, love, sex, and the universe.
It would have been a good defense-in theory, it’s a great defense-if what he’d written had been any good. “It’s an ongoing experience,” he backtalked. scolded him that he had not written about an experience. He had fallen into the kind of displaced stern-mother-and-wayward-son relation to the instructor that is one of the possible high-school teacher-student bonds, so Ms. The class-clown stoner, amid much giggling, read out some stream-of-consciousness gibberish. The next day we had to go around the circle and read what we’d written aloud. The teacher told us to write about an experience. I took a creative writing class in high school. There’s just too much of it, and it’s constantly in motion. You can’t highlight sentences on paper or onscreen.
You can’t read The Rainbow with a pencil in hand.
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